Google Summer of Code 2011

[AGS]

Next week the summer of code is starting. Developers are going to work on more than 1100 projects http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/proj ... e/gsoc2011

Google has been organising their summer of code for some years now. 'Students' propose a project which they should finish within a certain time frame. Every student gets guidance and help from a mentor. On august 16 the project should be finished.

I´ve looked at the projects that applied for a slot at the summer of code and found a lot of KDE related projects, lots of Python related projects and quite a few Gnome related projects. A little BSD here and there. All the participating organisations and the number of projects per organisation:
(this list is quite long):

Code: Select all

AbiWord: 5 projects
Apache Software Foundation: 40 projects
Apertium: 11 projects
ASCEND: 7 projects
Astrometry.net: 2 projects
Atomic Blue: 4 projects
Blender Foundation: 17 projects
BlueZ: 4 projects
Boost C++ Libraries: 10 projects
BRL-CAD: 2 projects
Buildbot: 2 projects
Catroid Project: 4 projects
Center for the Study of Complex Systems, University of Michigan: 8 projects
CERN Virtual Machine (CernVM): 4 projects
CGAL - Computational Geometry Algorithms Library: 6 projects
CMUSphinx Speech Recognition Toolkit: 2 projects
Climate Code Foundation: 3 projects
Code for America: 9 projects
Computational Science and Engineering at TU Wien: 3 projects
Connexions: 2 projects
coreboot: 4 projects
Crystal Space: 6 projects
darktable: 1 projects
Debian Project: 9 projects
Digital Mars: 3 projects
Django Software Foundation: 4 projects
DokuWiki: 2 projects
DragonFly BSD: 6 projects
Drizzle: 5 projects
Drupal: 20 projects
DuraSpace: 6 projects
Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, Scala Team: 4 projects
Electronic Frontier Foundation/The Tor Project: 7 projects
Elgg: 3 projects
Etherboot Project: 2 projects
Evergreen Project: 2 projects
FFmpeg / Libav: 10 projects
FOSSASIA: 3 projects
FiberCorps: 4 projects
fluxbox: 2 projects
FreeBSD: 17 projects
FreedroidRPG: 4 projects
Freenet Project Inc: 1 projects
Freeseer video recording and streaming suite: 2 projects
freifunk: 10 projects
GCC, the GNU Compiler Collection: 7 projects
GNOME Project: 27 projects
GNU Image Manipulation Program: 5 projects
GNU Project: 10 projects
GStreamer: 5 projects
Genome Informatics: 3 projects
Gentoo Foundation: 15 projects
Gephi Consortium: 7 projects
Git: 5 projects
GnuCash Free Accounting Software: 3 projects
Google Open Source Programs Office: 3 projects
Grassroots DICOM: 2 projects
Haiku: 8 projects
haskell.org: 7 projects
Hedgewars Project: 2 projects
HelenOS group at Department of Distributed and Dependable Systems, Charles University in Prague: 3 projects
Helsinki Institute for Information Technology: 4 projects
Hugin - Panorama photo stitcher: 2 projects
illumos: 2 projects
Inclusive Design Institute (IDI): 11 projects
Inkscape: 4 projects
Interface Ecology Lab @ Texas A&M University: 4 projects
International GeoGebra Institute: 7 projects
International Neuroinformatics Coordinating Facility: 2 projects
Isabelle: 2 projects
Jato VM: 4 projects
Jikes RVM: 4 projects
Jitsi (SIP Communicator), Kamailio and SEMS: 4 projects
K-9 Mail: 4 projects
KDE: 51 projects
Kernel.org - the Linux Kernel Organization: 3 projects
Komodo OpenLab Inc.: 3 projects
LanguageTool: 2 projects
Learning Unlimited: 2 projects
LibreOffice: 7 projects
LimeSurvey: 4 projects
Liquid Galaxy Project: 3 projects
MINIX 3 Research group at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, The Netherlands: 4 projects
Mapnik: 3 projects
Marine Biological Laboratory - Center for Library and Informatics: 4 projects
Melange: 4 projects
MetaBrainz Foundation Inc.: 3 projects
Mixxx: 3 projects
MoinMoin: 4 projects
Mono Project: 13 projects
Moodle: 3 projects
Mozilla: 12 projects
NTP: 4 projects
National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent): 8 projects
National Resource for Network Biology (GenMAPP, Cytoscape and WikiPathways): 10 projects
Natural User Interface Group: 6 projects
Nmap Security Scanner: 7 projects
OGRE - Open Source 3D Graphics Engine: 4 projects
OSGeo - Open Source Geospatial Foundation: 21 projects
Open Bioinformatics Foundation: 6 projects
Open Source Computer Vision Library (OpenCV): 11 projects
OpenICC Color Management: 2 projects
OpenImageIO: 3 projects
OpenIntents: 2 projects
OpenMRS: 16 projects
OpenNMS: 3 projects
OpenStreetMap: 3 projects
openSUSE Project: 16 projects
Openwall Project: 5 projects
Orange ? Data Mining Fruitful & Fun: 3 projects
Oregon State University Open Source Lab (OSUOSL): 1 projects
Parrot Foundation: 7 projects
phpMyAdmin: 8 projects
Plan 9 from Bell Labs: 2 projects
Plone Foundation: 5 projects
Point Cloud Library (PCL): 11 projects
Portland State University: 11 projects
PostgreSQL Global Development Group: 7 projects
Processing: 2 projects
Python Software Foundation: 36 projects
QEMU.org: 6 projects
R Project for Statistical Computing: 15 projects
RTEMS Project: 8 projects
ReactOS: 5 projects
Review Board: 3 projects
Rockbox: 2 projects
SETI Institute: 2 projects
Sahana Software Foundation: 6 projects
Sakai Project: 4 projects
Samba: 5 projects
Scilab: 9 projects
Scribus Team: 2 projects
ScummVM: 2 projects
Selenium: 3 projects
Sencha Labs: 2 projects
Shogun Machine Learning Toolbox (Technical University Berlin / Max Planck Campus T?bingen): 5 projects
Simple DirectMedia Layer: 1 projects
StatusNet: 5 projects
Sunlight Labs: 1 projects
SymPy: 9 projects
TYPO3 Association: 6 projects
Tcl/Tk Community: 7 projects
The Battle for Wesnoth: 5 projects
The Codehaus: 6 projects
The Eclipse Foundation: 17 projects
The Fedora Project: 6 projects
The Gambit Project: 4 projects
The Globus Alliance: 9 projects
The Honeynet Project: 12 projects
The Java Pathfinder Team: 12 projects
The LLVM Compiler Infrastructure: 7 projects
The Linux Foundation: 13 projects
The MacPorts Project: 3 projects
The NetBSD Foundation: 9 projects
The Perl Foundation: 6 projects
Theoretical Biophysics @ Humboldt University: 3 projects
Tianocore: 4 projects
Umit Project: 8 projects
Universal Subtitles: 2 projects
Unknown Horizons: 3 projects
VideoLAN: 14 projects
Visualization Toolkit (VTK): 2 projects
Wikimedia Foundation: 8 projects
Wine: 5 projects
WordPress: 12 projects
WorldForge: 8 projects
wxWidgets: 4 projects
X.Org Foundation: 5 projects
XMMS2 - X-platform Music Multiplexing System 2: 4 projects
XMPP Standards Foundation: 5 projects
XWiki: 3 projects
Xapian Search Engine Library: 4 projects
Xen.org: 6 projects

And there is at least one organisation missing: The FreeBASIC foundation :)

Let's suppose a student would want to get a slot at google summer of code 2012. And that student would want to work on a FreeBASIC related project. What can a developer create within a timespan of 3 months that would help the development of the fbc? And who would we want to see working (as a 'student') on a fbc related project?

edit: cleaned up the list so it now only mentions the number of projects per organisation.

[TJF]

What can a developer create within a timespan of 3 months that would help the development of the fbc?

- Var length arrays in UDTs.
- Pilot projects to port FreeBasic to new platforms (Mac, Android)
- ... (to be continued)

And who would we want to see working (as a 'student') on a fbc related project?

Anyone who can finish at the given level. (OK, v1ctor may want to finetune the solution before it gets implemented, but finetuning is less work than developing from scratch.)

I think it's a good idea to collect such project ideas (we need more than the title). OK, only one of four students may be able to finish such a project. But if we don't describe projects, nobody will start to work for FreeBasic.

[KristopherWindsor]

You could just link to this list of participating companies and not have such a long post. :)

I am curious about Summer of Code.
Do random companies list tasks and then have Google pay people to do them? Or does Google organize it but nobody is paid?
And if students propose the projects, then what do all of these other companies do?

[AGS]

I put the entire list up there so you could see how many projects there are per organisation as I thought that was important (KDE: over 50 projects, Python: over 30 projects, Gnome: over 25 projects).

Applying for a slot at the summer of code goes something like this:

Organisations apply for a mentoring slot at the summer of code. Google either accepts an organisation or not. After an organisation has been accepted students can turn to an accepted mentoring organisation for a project. The student should come up with a project.

Of course the mentoring organisation will already have an idea on what type of projects is of interest to them. So there might be a certain limit as to the kind of project ideas that will get accepted by the mentoring organisation.

All the info can be found here

http://www.google-melange.com/document/ ... c2011/faqs

As far as payment goes: a student gets 5000 USD while the organisation a student is coding for gets 500 USD.

I think the biggest problem would be getting the freebasic community accepted as a mentoring organisation. For every student you need a mentor and the mentoring organisation must be represented by at least two people.

The whole idea of having some people programming for the freebasic project during a set time period is one that I find appealing. Not for three months of course and there would be no money involved.

Just a time frame, a number of programmers and an explicit goal. At the very least you'd get more people that know most of the ins- and outs of the compiler.

[anonymous1337]

I've recently found out about Google AI challenges, too. http://ai-contest.com/

I'm sure with all the contests going on that I didn't know existed until now, there's at least one I'd be interested in contributing to at any given moment in time.

PS AGS: You can at least eliminate redundant data from your post.

[AGS]

I've recently found out about Google AI challenges, too. http://ai-contest.com/

I'm sure with all the contests going on that I didn't know existed until now, there's at least one I'd be interested in contributing to at any given moment in time.

PS AGS: You can at least eliminate redundant data from your post.

I removed the redundant data and added the number of projects per organisation to the table. It was actually quite useful to redo the list as I can see much clearer now how many projects there are per organisation.

AI challenges... interesting stuff. Looked up the 2011 one. It's about... ants?

Introducing Ants

Page History

The Google AI Challenge is all about creating artificial intelligence, whether you are a beginning programmer or an expert. Using one of the easy-to-use starter kits, you will create a computer program (in any language) that controls a colony of ants which fight against other colonies for domination.

It only takes 5 minutes to submit one of the starter kits to the website and watch your ant colony fight for domination against colonies created by other people from around the world. From there check out the tutorials on how to locally run your bot and begin programming!

I'd say wipe those LISP/C++ programmers out :) It would be nice if a FB program would make it into the top 10 of the AI Challenge.

https://github.com/aichallenge/aichalle ... tart-Guide